Editorials

Town Council's vote shows an open mind

The Town Council's unanimous decision to appoint a task force to study the needs of local seniors, analyze services and make recommendations for improvements is very good news, indeed.

The town appropriates funds to agencies to provide services for the town's older citizens, and it provides a drop-in center, but unlike other local cities, Los Gatos has no senior center and no staff trained in the field of aging to supervise a coordinated senior program.

The process
of allocating resources has been an efficient way to handle social services for seniors, but it's time to ask the question--is it the best way to meet the diverse needs of our seniors? The question needs to be asked particularly in light of the so-called Age Wave already under way with the aging of the
baby boomers.

The Town Council clearly agrees.

We hope the task force will attract not only active seniors who can help determine what they would like in a senior center, but community leaders with political clout and fundraising know-how. Seniors will not be able to do this alone. It will need to be a community effort.

The task force would do well to take the lead
of the library's board of directors, which recognized that unless its new library visioning committee visited other libraries, members would be at a loss to comprehend what was possible in a 21st-century library.

What might task force members find visiting senior centers? In Saratoga, to use a nearby example, the city set up a senior coordinating council in 1979 to oversee the creation of a senior center. Early on, the coordinating council set up an endowment fund. One Saratoga woman who was alone and had found friendships at the center left property to the endowment. The interest from the endowment forms the bulk of the senior center's budget.

When Saratoga voters repealed the city's utility-users tax several years ago, the center lost almost $20,000 of its funding, but the coordinating council bounced back with a fundraising drive that is now a permanent activity. It also engages in other fundraising activities throughout the year.

In Los Gatos, a handful of dedicated volunteers help out at the drop-in center; Saratoga is blessed with some 300 volunteers. One full or part-time staff person focused only on senior programming can leverage many volunteers.

We believe that a key step toward creating a senior center--even if the best step for the time being is better use of the Neighborhood Center--is to get a person on staff who is trained in the field of aging.

The town has an energetic and creative community services director, but her administrative duties cover a broad field of services. It is not reasonable to think that she could do all she does and handle the day-to-day demands of running a coordinated senior program.

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